the mechanism, with negative results.'
Without responding, St. Cyr, followed by the others, walked to the junction of the corridors, where a telephone rested on an ornate gold and white stand; he picked it up and listened to the silence for a long time, then hung up. He said, 'Are all the phones in the house on this one line?'
'Yes,' Teddy said.
'Isn't that odd?'
'No, sir. The house computer has a functional node that operates as a switchboard for all the extensions.'
'You mean the phone is out of order?' Jubal asked. He looked as though he was ready to take on the president of the communications company. 'That's unheard of!'
St. Cyr looked at the telephone and, as patiently as he could, explained: 'Not out of order, Mr. Alderban. Someone has cut the lines.'
No one had to be told what that meant.
St. Cyr turned to Teddy and said, 'Is there a vehicle of any sort in the garage that could transport the entire family out of here?'
'We have a small bus, for excursions,' Teddy said. 'It is more than adequate.' He was calm, rational, even-voiced. St. Cyr wished that he had to deal solely with machines; he could already see how the family was going to react to the news that they would cut and run.
'We'll leave in the bus,' the cyberdetective said.
'Leave?' Jubal asked. But he was not disagreeing particularly; he was beyond that, but he was perplexed.
'We can only assume that the killer has cut off our ties with the outside world in order to make his final moves without fear of police intervention.'
'Tonight?' Dane asked.
'It looks that way.'
'But if we run—' Jubal began.
'At least we'll be alive tomorrow,' St. Cyr finished. 'Let's go get Tina and Alicia.'
'And Hirschel,' Jubal said.
'Yes, and Hirschel.'
'Wait a minute,' Dane said. His voice was high-pitched, excited, as it had been when they were with Norya. 'If we split up, we could get everyone together much faster. I'll go tell Tina what's happening. Father, you go see that mother knows—'
'Forget that,' St. Cyr said.
'What?'
'We stay together from now on. It'll take us longer to get ready, but we'll all be safer in the end.'
Dane said, 'Are you afraid that one of us might be attacked?' His voice contained no sarcasm, just an edge of fear.
'Or that one of you might attack someone else,' St. Cyr said. The fear he thought he heard in Dane Alderban's voice could as easily have been faked. 'I don't trust anyone in this household. The sooner each of you gets that through his head — and the sooner all of you become as cynical as I am — the less chance there is that the killer can get away with a fifth murder.'
He turned and walked down the main corridor toward the elevator, conscious that they were behind him. He fought an urge to whirl about and see what they were doing, what expressions marked their faces. As long as two or more were at his back, he was safe. He just had to remember never to turn his back on a man alone — or a woman alone, for that matter.
Fifteen minutes later, Teddy led the way across the garage floor to the ten-seat bus that was parked in the last stall. The family trailed after him, more willing to evacuate the mansion than St. Cyr had imagined they would be. Only Tina had questioned the wisdom of packing them all in one bus when the killer might be one of their number, and only Tina had not been completely satisfied with his arguments for this course of action. She had said, 'Bullshit.'
At the bus, St. Cyr stopped them with one word and, remaining slightly separated from them, his own pistol in the chamois shoulder holster under his bandaged arm, said, 'Do those of you issued the narcotic-dart pistols still have them?'
Dane, Tina and Jubal said that they did.
St. Cyr turned to Hirschel and said, 'What have you got?'
The hunter took a nasty-looking projectile pistol from a holster under his jacket. The weapon had a short snout, a thick trunk where a large number of rounds were stored, a butt sculpted to fit Hirschel's hand. 'It'll stop a boar, and it'll make confetti of a man.'
The statement seemed to make Alicia Alderban ill, though the others did not evidence any reluctance to witness such a thing.
'Anything else?' St. Cyr asked him.
Hirschel smiled slightly and pulled a knife from his waistband. 'It's good for close work, hand-to-hand combat. But it's also balanced well enough for throwing.'
'Fine,' St. Cyr said. 'You all came prepared. Now if you'll just hand over the narcotic-dart guns, the projectile pistol and the knife, we can leave.'
Jubal's face flushed, and he stepped toward St. Cyr with his blocky fists bunched at his sides again, the same pose he had assumed the first time the cyberdetective had implied that the murderer might be a member of his family. 'What in the hell is this, Sc Cyr? Do you want to leave all of us defenseless? You've already told us that —'
'Jubal,' St. Cyr said, cutting him short, 'I think you're one of the most short-sighted sonsofbitches I've ever met.'
The old man stopped and stared at the detective as if St. Cyr were some new, alien species. He was clearly not accustomed to being spoken to like that, without deference and respect. He had just walked into a brick wall.
'I think you've had money too long,' St. Cyr went on. 'You've always had life easy, never had to really compete, and now a few important parts of your brain seem to have atrophied.'
It felt good, awfully good.
Until this moment, the cyberdetective had not realized fully how much the household had weighted him down, how depressed he was by the emotional barrenness of this old man. He looked at Tina and realized that her death would be taken as lightly as the others, absorbed by the family — a few tears shed, a few minutes of loss, and then back to the canvas or the typewriter or the guitar, back to the art. Somehow, that was more evil than the killer, more despicable than bloody murder.
St. Cyr said, 'I told you the killer was here, among us. I haven't the faintest notion, yet, who he is. But I'm not taking any chances that he'll be on that bus, jammed in with the rest of us, with a weapon in his hand. I feel as if I'm on the verge of figuring out this whole damned thing, that it could break any time now. But until it does, until I can positively nail someone with it, we're taking every possible precaution. Now, please, hand over your weapons.'
They complied with his demand.
The old man handed his gun over last, reluctantly. He watched as St. Cyr located a large piece of buffing cloth in the car-washing supplies cabinet and bundled the artillery together. He said, 'I hope you'll remember that I'm still your employer, Mr. St. Cyr. I hired you; I pay you; and I can let you go.'
'Bullshit,' St. Cyr said.
'Fantastic!' Tina chimed in, grinning. 'You're actually getting emotional; you actually sound like a human being; Baker.'
'Scared,' he said. 'That's all.'
'That's human enough,' she said.
He smiled, nodded and said, 'Let's get aboard. The sooner we're among other people, the better I'll
